Both Reid and Waters will read segments from their books in a back and forth format to highlight the similar themes found in one another’s works.

Each book is set in Sonoma County and share similarities in time and place. The main action occurs in the late 1990s or early 2000s, but both plots contain flashbacks to the childhood and teenage years of their characters, back to the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. Most settings are in the small towns of Sonoma County: Sebastopol, Healdsburg, Petaluma, in the redwoods, vineyards, beach towns, and along the winding back roads. READ MORE…

Dear San Francisco Chapter WNBA Members,

Welcome to a new program year! I’d like to welcome our new board members as well, a dynamic team who promises to plan, promote, and post about events and our members’ works, celebrating the community of the book.

This year, we are ramping up our website with many new features:

BOOKTALK! THE BUZZ IN THE WORLD OF BOOKS: posts articles about trends in publishing and writing by experts in their fields

BOOK REVIEWS column: reviews new books by member authors and those authors featured in SF Chapter sponsored events

FEATURED MEMBER INTERVIEW: interviews members of all kinds, writers, publishers, librarians, booksellers, and coaches

We invite you all to participate by submitting your articles, reviews, or requests for interviews via our website to the Editors.

As you read each article in the newsletter, click READ MORE… That will take you to our website with even more detailed information about the event, article, book review, interview, announcement, or program.

Kate Farrell, President

There is so much to tell you, we couldn’t fit it all in the newsletter!

Join us for a wonderful Fall season to celebrate the world of books. If you’ve not renewed, please do so now.

Featuring four WNBA–San Francisco Chapter Member / Authors with newly released novels in an amazing panel! Wine, hors d’oeuvres, FREE!

Join us for an intriguing evening of books and discussion, moderated by Patricia V. Davis who will introduce our stellar member authors, lead our discussion, and raffle off their books. Davis is a bestselling author and the founder of The Women’s PowerStrategy™ Conference.

In the tradition of Kristin Hannah and Karen Joy Fowler, Meg Waite Clayton, bestselling author of The Wednesday Sisters, returns with an enthralling new novel of mothers, daughters, and the secrets and dreams passed down through generations.

Sisters Natalie and Alice Kessler were close, until adolescence wrenched them apart. Natalie is headstrong, manipulative—and beautiful; Alice is a dreamer who loves books and birds. During their family’s summer holiday at the lake, Alice falls under the thrall of a struggling young painter, Thomas Bayber, in whom she finds a kindred spirit. Natalie, however, remains strangely unmoved, sitting for a family portrait with surprising indifference. But by the end of the summer, three lives are shattered.

Isolated in a remote field station in the middle of a tropical rainforest in the late 1960’s, a young woman named Kirsten rebels against traditional female roles and wages a desperate struggle for intellectual, spiritual, personal, and sexual liberation from her biologist husband who views her as a piece of property and the creatures of the rainforest as specimens to be killed, stuffed, and catalogued. The result of this tangle of adultery and relentless tropical heat leads to murder, but of an unexpected victim.

It’s Thanksgiving week, 1989. We’re in Big Piney and Little Piney, two hollows near the town of Garnet in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A handful of mismatched folks – some country people, some far-flung, fancy people – discover they have one thing in common: someone they know is sick, real sick, dying sick. Their paths cross at a local hospice called Solace. Suddenly, they’re caregivers, bedside improvisers, doing all they can to beat back death or “hurry him on about his business.”

BOOKTALK! The Buzz in the World of Books

“One lazy man is a disgrace, two is a law firm, and three is a congress.”~ John Adams in the musical 1776

Although its follies and problems measure up to its potential and stature, the United States is the best and greatest country the world has ever had. The signing of the Declaration of Independence is worthy of celebration, if only to remind us of how it came about, its vision of America, and our role in keeping its ideals alive.

America is a centrist country, but the public usually hears more from the ends of the political spectrum rather than the middle. Perkins asked his audience to do one thing every day to make the world better, an idea as powerful as it is simple. More than ever before, writers have the opportunity, not just to make a living, but to make a difference. It’s easier than ever for the right idea and the right book to change the world, and the Internet enables you reach the world with your fingertips.

Perkins said that when Rachel Carson sat down at her small desk in her Pennsylvania home to write about how DDT was harming the planet, she had no idea that she would write The Silent Spring, a bestseller that became a classic that liberated the world from DDT and started the international environmental movement.

Whether you write fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, your passion and your gift for portraying the challenges we face and proposing solutions can make a difference. It’s impossible for you to know how big a difference you can make, but it’s much greater than you think.

How about writing and signing you own declaration of independence from whatever is keeping you from becoming the best, most creative and productive person that you were born to be and that only you can be? Free yourself from beliefs, people, and activities that waste your resources but don’t help you achieve your goals. That will be something for you to celebrate every day.

In the spring of 1959, The Diary of Anne Frank has just come to the silver screen to great acclaim, and a young woman named Margie Franklin is working in Philadelphia as a secretary at a Jewish law firm. On the surface she lives a quiet life, but Margie has a secret: a life she once lived, a past and a religion she has denied, and a family and acountry she left behind.

Lauren Grodstein, THE EXPLANATION FOR EVERYTHING: A NOVEL

At Exton Reed college, biologist Andy Waite is nearing the moment when his life might settle down a bit: tenure is in sight, his daughters are starting to grow up, and he’s slowly but surely healing from the loss of his wife. His life is starting to make sense again. That is, until the entrance of a young student who wants him to direct her independent study.

Author of Mary Russell / Sherlock Holmes series takes us to vibrant and sensual 1920s Paris in a thrilling new mystery.

Summer, 1929. Global financial ruin may be on the horizon, but in Paris, decadence is synonymous with freedom. The American expat community of artists, musicians, and writers is joined by Harris Stuyvesant, private inquiry agent and former officer with the American Bureau of Investigation. Stuyvesant is investigating a missing American girl, whose disappearance may be one of many, and possibly linked to a series of murders. Featuring cameos by historical icons like Man Ray, Sylvia Beach, Ernest Hemingway, Josephine Baker, and many more, King paints a portrait of a city at its most vibrant-and dangerous.

It’s Thanksgiving week, 1989. We’re in Big Piney and Little Piney, two hollows near the town of Garnet in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A handful of mismatched folks – some country people, some far-flung, fancy people – discover they have one thing in common: someone they know is sick, real sick, dying sick. Their paths cross at a local hospice called Solace. Suddenly, they’re caregivers, bedside improvisers, doing all they can to beat back death or “hurry him on about his business.”

We first meet Cinnamon Monday near death, collapsed in the loamy earth of a vineyard somewhere in Sonoma County, California, savagely beaten by her meth-addicted boyfriend. Her story, told in first person, involves us immediately in her survival. We then come to know her more intimately through an intricate weaving of time periods in her life, in alternating chapters of childhood memories of neglect with present time recovery from her own drug addiction and abuse.

Rayme Waters

While reading, I began to wonder if Waters was as influenced by British classic literature, fairy tales, and myths as much as her main character, Cinnamon, was. The book’s plot structure shows the careful arrangement of pieces coming together in full circle, in a most Dickensian manner. The unexpected rise and fall of fortune in social classes high and low reveal a universal quality of plot that sometimes elevate the book to mythic levels and depict the archetype of the heroine’s journey, from Cinderella to Persephone.

Five women friends, who’ve known each other for a lifetime, are compelled to meet at an old childhood haunt, a beach house on Dillon Beach in Northern California. That this beach house belonged to the parents of a sixth friend who walked into the ocean on Prom night there sets the stage for an uneasy sense of place and time. They arrive to confront that tragic loss of thirty-five years ago, long unresolved, brought together as if by fate.

A sense of loss permeates the book—perhaps it is the onslaught of mid-life crisis as each woman faces her fifty-fifth year. The beach house gathering then becomes a forced vantage point to look back and evaluate each one’s life in a new way: The truth about many incidents are revealed. Each friend takes turns in questioning one another as the plot moves back and forth in time, from childhood, to adolescence, to young adult years, and to the uncertain present.

Your entry must be uploaded without your name, address, or contact information on the actual document. Your contact information will be collected on a separate form when you submit your entry. Applicants must be 18 years of age or older. You may submit more than one entry, however, each one must be separately submitted and paid. Acceptable formats are: Word Document 2007, Word Document 2003 or earlier version, RTF (Rich Text Format).

Both Rayme Waters, author of THE ANGELS’ SHARE, and Linda Loveland Reid, author of SOMETHING IN STONE, share the same setting, Sonoma County, but their writing process and publication paths were quite different.

Linda began SOMETHING IN STONE with “great enthusiasm” up until it all petered out at 20,000 words. The only thing to do was begin over again, and instead of writing about her childhood friends specifically, she invented new people who had new issues. “This freed me to write in any direction, using just the “feel” from being part of group of women who have shared a lifetime, love/hate relationship. I mean, you can’t go back and order up a new set of grammar school friends.”

THE ANGELS’ SHARE began as a story about a family who owned a San Francisco hotel, but as Rayme Waters describes, “Cinnamon’s story really took over and became the novel’s heart. Agents and publishers whom I showed the early manuscript to wanted less hotel and more Cinnamon and I found it relatively easy to comply–at some points it was like she was leaning over my shoulder telling me what to write.”

No matter how the books get into reader’s hands, Linda said it best, “The idea that my words might touch someone, help them to understand themselves or another a little better…well, I’m one lucky person.”

This year the Women’s National Book Association, San Francisco Chapter, is sponsoring a Book Drive to benefit the Living Room, Santa Rosa, a daytime drop-in center that provides a safe haven to ease the adversity of homelessness for women. In January, WNBA-SF launched an early literacy activity at the Living Room, using donated books for picture book storytelling—part of the Living Room’s Mother and Child program.

Now we are pleased to announce that the SF Chapter will increase its visits to the Living Room from biweekly to weekly: every Monday at 10:30 am. We will be collaborating with community partners to purchase children’s books at low cost and to request book donations.

Without the efforts and donations of WNBA SF Chapter, there would be no literacy program at the Living Room or focus on children’s books and reading.

To support this developing program, SF Chapter will donate 10% of its net income to purchasing books for the Living Room at deeply discounted prices. But we need your support to make this a real success!

Book Drive: At all our SF Chapter events throughout the year, we will accept classic children’s picture books and board books in English and Spanish. Look for the Living Room Book Drive box. READ MORE…